by Steven David Horwich
Universal Private Education. This is part two of his article, Homeschooling in the 21st Century. It deals with what you can do as a homeschool teacher when a student’s potentials become apparent.
The locating of a student’s interest and potential is a strength of homeschooling, and homeschool families must capitalize on it. I believe that the discovery of a student’s real interests and skills should be the core and first purpose of education. Homeschool can accomplish this with far greater ease and focus than can any school, as we’ve discussed.
But let’s look at one last reason schools can’t do the job.
The fact is that no school can effectively service a student whose potential has awakened.
As we discussed, school cannot and does not handle individuals as individuals. The individual student’s unique interests are not covered in the school’s “standard curricula”. The student striving for some goal he suddenly sees is automatically working outside the boundaries established by the needs of a school. Schools strive for an unreachable, non-existent “average.”
Potential awakened exceeds any possible “average”.
Schools are good at one thing, however, which will go a long way toward explaining where our Abe Lincolns have disappeared to. Schools are terrific at limiting potential through “standardized” curricula, standard tests, testing, grading, through the use of classrooms stuffed to the rafters with children who have nothing in common but their age, through enforced homework that drains the day of any discretionary time for dreaming, through completely ignoring the individual as an individual and through a dozen other failed approaches.
But homeschool need suffer none of these failings. In a homeschool situation, when a student reveals interest, skill and potential in a given area, the educational world around him can be altered, moved, shaped and directed to support his ambitions. The tools available, even in and perhaps especially in our depressed and suppressed economy, are amazing.
Let’s look at those resources. I’m going to focus for a few moments on America, as I understand the resources here best, but I ask that if you live outside the United States, you draw your own corollaries.
One resource available today to some homeschool families is flexible time. In Lincoln’s day, the sun dictated when work was to be done. Education had to wait for farm families until the sun set, and by that time, dinner and bed were not too far off. They had to be up and working with the setting sun.
Today, the available time for education is expanded by electric light. The available options for experience are vastly expanded by the family car. The car brings municipal resources into the educational line-up such as parks, zoos, museums and libraries. Lincoln would have no doubt have wept to have had the opportunity to use such resources.
TV and DVDs provides the resource of truly remarkable documentaries, of which there have been hundreds produced over the past decade. Almost every subject has been illuminated in one or many documentaries. I know. I’ve watched and researched documentaries for a decade while writing my curriculum and looking for good resources. I found many.
Today, money is often tight and often both mother and father work. But in many homeschool situations, at least one parent works around the house. There are many businesses and jobs that center around the Internet, or which are executed out of a residence. In some very fortunate families, one parent is often free to be a full-time caregiver to the children.
By the way, the number of books available today is positively astronomical compared to Lincoln’s time. In fact, one difficult task faced by the educator is to select which books and resources to use out of the ocean available. There’s a nice problem to have.
And then, there’s the Internet, the most useful and dangerous tool available to educators. Its potential for danger is, I hope, apparent to any parent or student working with it. There are lots of creeps and liars and dangerous people who use the Internet for really vile purposes and needless to say, the student must avoid these. There is also a lot of misinformation available on the Internet under the guise of “information”. After all, anyone can place a site or an article on the Internet. So there are many “experts” out there who are far from expert, and who provide misleading garbage under the guise of expertise.
Now, I can hear a few of you thinking “that’s why we need to go back to books”. First of all, I don’t believe that books should have ever been “given up” in favor of the Internet or any other resource. Books have been the most important means of communicating information by our species for a very long time. A recent investigation discovered that families with over 500 books in their house were far more likely to have their children go to college than families with few if any books in their house. Not that college is necessarily a great goal for any and all students, but this is a measure of the importance of the availability of books as a part of education.
And I know some are thinking that books are more likely to be accurate as to the info that they carry. This just isn’t so, folks, not anymore.
While writing science courses, I read four textbooks about each science subject (chemistry, physics, etc), and I found a massive number of errors and contradictions in even the most basic information. A book is only as good as its author and its editor, and I have seen both be horribly wrong. In fact, these books often contradicted each other as to basic information! I’ve also seen Internet sites that masquerade as “expert” offer complete trash and self-serving promotion in lieu of useful information.
The bottom line is that any potential source of information is suspect until proven consistently accurate and useful.
The good news – today there are far more possible sources that are of educational use then at any time in history. The bad news – you’ll need to keep your eyes and ears working, and your mind evaluating those sources. When you find useless or incorrect sources, block them and warn others. When you find useful sources, hang on to them and share them broadly. In that way everyone wins.
Steven Horwich is an Emmy and Dramalogue award-winning writer/director, who has split his life between the arts and education. A teacher with over 35 years and over 20,000 hours of experience from elementary school through university-level teaching, he started homeschooling his own children in 2002. This led him to author over 300 courses since 2002, a complete curricula (excluding math) for ages 5-adult, called Connect The Thoughts. Over 20,000 people have used CTT since making it available via the Internet in 2007. His curricula is presented at www.connectthethoughts.com. There is over 5 hours of film explaining his courses and approach. He has authored a book about education today, Poor Cheated Little Johnny, and a teacher training program to go with it. He currently presents a free webinar about education and homeschooling every third Tuesday.
Universal Private Education. This is part two of his article, Homeschooling in the 21st Century. It deals with what you can do as a homeschool teacher when a student’s potentials become apparent.
The locating of a student’s interest and potential is a strength of homeschooling, and homeschool families must capitalize on it. I believe that the discovery of a student’s real interests and skills should be the core and first purpose of education. Homeschool can accomplish this with far greater ease and focus than can any school, as we’ve discussed.
But let’s look at one last reason schools can’t do the job.
The fact is that no school can effectively service a student whose potential has awakened.
As we discussed, school cannot and does not handle individuals as individuals. The individual student’s unique interests are not covered in the school’s “standard curricula”. The student striving for some goal he suddenly sees is automatically working outside the boundaries established by the needs of a school. Schools strive for an unreachable, non-existent “average.”
Potential awakened exceeds any possible “average”.
Schools are good at one thing, however, which will go a long way toward explaining where our Abe Lincolns have disappeared to. Schools are terrific at limiting potential through “standardized” curricula, standard tests, testing, grading, through the use of classrooms stuffed to the rafters with children who have nothing in common but their age, through enforced homework that drains the day of any discretionary time for dreaming, through completely ignoring the individual as an individual and through a dozen other failed approaches.
But homeschool need suffer none of these failings. In a homeschool situation, when a student reveals interest, skill and potential in a given area, the educational world around him can be altered, moved, shaped and directed to support his ambitions. The tools available, even in and perhaps especially in our depressed and suppressed economy, are amazing.
Let’s look at those resources. I’m going to focus for a few moments on America, as I understand the resources here best, but I ask that if you live outside the United States, you draw your own corollaries.
One resource available today to some homeschool families is flexible time. In Lincoln’s day, the sun dictated when work was to be done. Education had to wait for farm families until the sun set, and by that time, dinner and bed were not too far off. They had to be up and working with the setting sun.
Today, the available time for education is expanded by electric light. The available options for experience are vastly expanded by the family car. The car brings municipal resources into the educational line-up such as parks, zoos, museums and libraries. Lincoln would have no doubt have wept to have had the opportunity to use such resources.
TV and DVDs provides the resource of truly remarkable documentaries, of which there have been hundreds produced over the past decade. Almost every subject has been illuminated in one or many documentaries. I know. I’ve watched and researched documentaries for a decade while writing my curriculum and looking for good resources. I found many.
Today, money is often tight and often both mother and father work. But in many homeschool situations, at least one parent works around the house. There are many businesses and jobs that center around the Internet, or which are executed out of a residence. In some very fortunate families, one parent is often free to be a full-time caregiver to the children.
By the way, the number of books available today is positively astronomical compared to Lincoln’s time. In fact, one difficult task faced by the educator is to select which books and resources to use out of the ocean available. There’s a nice problem to have.
And then, there’s the Internet, the most useful and dangerous tool available to educators. Its potential for danger is, I hope, apparent to any parent or student working with it. There are lots of creeps and liars and dangerous people who use the Internet for really vile purposes and needless to say, the student must avoid these. There is also a lot of misinformation available on the Internet under the guise of “information”. After all, anyone can place a site or an article on the Internet. So there are many “experts” out there who are far from expert, and who provide misleading garbage under the guise of expertise.
Now, I can hear a few of you thinking “that’s why we need to go back to books”. First of all, I don’t believe that books should have ever been “given up” in favor of the Internet or any other resource. Books have been the most important means of communicating information by our species for a very long time. A recent investigation discovered that families with over 500 books in their house were far more likely to have their children go to college than families with few if any books in their house. Not that college is necessarily a great goal for any and all students, but this is a measure of the importance of the availability of books as a part of education.
And I know some are thinking that books are more likely to be accurate as to the info that they carry. This just isn’t so, folks, not anymore.
While writing science courses, I read four textbooks about each science subject (chemistry, physics, etc), and I found a massive number of errors and contradictions in even the most basic information. A book is only as good as its author and its editor, and I have seen both be horribly wrong. In fact, these books often contradicted each other as to basic information! I’ve also seen Internet sites that masquerade as “expert” offer complete trash and self-serving promotion in lieu of useful information.
The bottom line is that any potential source of information is suspect until proven consistently accurate and useful.
The good news – today there are far more possible sources that are of educational use then at any time in history. The bad news – you’ll need to keep your eyes and ears working, and your mind evaluating those sources. When you find useless or incorrect sources, block them and warn others. When you find useful sources, hang on to them and share them broadly. In that way everyone wins.
Steven Horwich is an Emmy and Dramalogue award-winning writer/director, who has split his life between the arts and education. A teacher with over 35 years and over 20,000 hours of experience from elementary school through university-level teaching, he started homeschooling his own children in 2002. This led him to author over 300 courses since 2002, a complete curricula (excluding math) for ages 5-adult, called Connect The Thoughts. Over 20,000 people have used CTT since making it available via the Internet in 2007. His curricula is presented at www.connectthethoughts.com. There is over 5 hours of film explaining his courses and approach. He has authored a book about education today, Poor Cheated Little Johnny, and a teacher training program to go with it. He currently presents a free webinar about education and homeschooling every third Tuesday.
